Iron Man 2 Eye-On

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Say hello to my little War Machine.

By Michael Thomsen

Kyle Brink, creative director on Iron Man 2, realizes the first game didn't leave a good impression. When the second game was officially greenlit, he had only 14 months to finish it, while the typical 360/PS3 game takes 24 to 36 months to complete. In spite of the grueling schedule and lackluster original, Brink was determined to improve things for the sequel. I got a chance to see a new version of the game at a preview event in New York, and it looks like a much different experience compared to the original.

The biggest change has been to the controls. In contrast to the original, SEGA has worked to make controls consistent between the flying and ground portions of the game. If a move works on the ground, then it should work similarly in the air. You can toggle the hover ability on or off with the left shoulder button and the right shoulder button toggles lock-on mode. Taking a cue from Batman: Arkham Asylum, the lock-on mode automatically pulls you towards an enemy regardless of how near or far they are. This new approach looks a lot more dramatic but also makes it easier to manage your attacks because you don't have to fret over depth perception and rotating the camera. Just input attack commands and the game applies those attacks to the most intuitive target.

You'll have weapons on your right and left shoulders, which are operated independently with the right and left trigger buttons. The B button is used to perform contextual actions, like batting missiles back at enemies. A radar in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen helps to keep track of enemies during combat, showing threats as a red dots and blinking loudly when missiles are headed your way.

The demo takes place about halfway through the game, and starts off with a giant mechanized crab, called Arc Armiger, attacking S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Helicarrier. Both the behemoth crab and the Helicarrier have health meter's stretching across the top of the screen. Playing as War Machine, it's your job to destroy the giant mech before it destroys the Hellicarrier. The battle will take a long time, as the heavily armored robot is hard to damage initially. You'll have to fight smaller henchmen robots in the meantime, making the confrontation a good test of skill and reflex. Once you've got the Arc Armiger's health down to one-third, it will start limping across the deck of the Hellicarrier, but its attack damage goes up significantly as well, making the end of the fight even more intense than the beginning.

Another major focus of the game is variety. Brink and his team wanted to make each level feel like it was different from the ones that preceded it. To wit, the game starts with some corridor-creeping, some indoor flight segments, some stealth sections, and then graduates to the wide-open arena combat of the Arc Armiger sequence. After beating the crab-bot, you'll be given another change of pace as the metal behemoth will accompany you through the next area, an industrial shipping yard on an island. You can highlight targets for the robot by aiming at some stationary guns and holding down on the D-pad. To target multiple enemies, you just target one and then keep holding the D-pad down as you move your reticle. The Arc Armiger will remember all the selected targets until you let go of the D-pad.

The game is going to be "temporally agnostic," meaning the story is separate from the timeline of the movie, though it features the likeness and voices of both Robert Downey Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson. Paramount gave SEGA license to do with the story whatever they felt was most appropriate. The result is a story that draws heavily from the comic book lore, which should delight long-time fans. Instead of fighting robot Mickey Rourke, for instance, you'll be in manly confrontation with A.I.M., which first appeared in the comic book in the '60s.

You'll also be able to upgrade Tony Stark's suit using an in-game economy. Instead of collecting money, you'll gather "Field Data," which can be spent like money to build new weapon prototypes and unlock different kinds of ammo. You can tweak each weapon by adding a custom ammo type and a specific hybrid module that affects how it fires. At the beginning of each mission, you'll see an updated version of the Iron Man suit assemble around Tony Stark, with all the weapon changes visible on the suit itself.

I think you stepped in something.

Brink says the game will take 10 to 12 hours to finish on a first playthrough. The idea of adding multiplayer had been briefly considered, but there just wasn't time to implement a worthwhile option with such a shortened development cycle. It's still uncertain how much variety has really been packed into the missions, but what I saw was definitely an improvement on the first game. It controls much more smoothly, encourages spectacle-driven combat in the open (rather than bogging players down behind cover), and won't be tied to a cinematic storyline that might not make sense for gameplay.

Iron Man 2 will hit stores in late April, just a little earlier than the movie.